Camera Test Starts Today For Courts

By KIRK JOHNSON

Published: December 1, 1987

After years of hesitation in New York State's legal system, the courts in New York City and four upstate counties will step tentatively into the electronic age today when cameras are allowed for the first time in 50 years during sentencings, trials and testimony.

But court administrators and representatives of news organizations say the day's camera coverage - the first day of an 18-month experiment - will probably feature little of the high drama often associated with the criminal-justice system.

According to the State Office of Court Administration, only one application for camera coverage, at a pretrial hearing in an attempted-murder case in State Supreme Court on Staten Island, has been granted in New York City. Broad Discretion

At least four other applications were known to have been approved for trials outside the city, although judges are not required to report applications for camera coverage.

The slow start, the officials say, is due partly to the tight restrictions that judges can impose on media coverage under the rules of the experiment. For example, the system requires seven days' advance notice for scheduled trials, and judges have broad discretion to deny applications in sensitive cases, particularly sex crimes.

Another factor, at least as far as television coverage, is the high cost of staffing courtrooms with video camera crews, which television news executives said would make video coverage prohibitive except in the most newsworthy trials.

The concerns over cameras in court, and the fears that they will distort or disrupt the process, echo from the 1930's, when officials in many states, including New York, clamped down on visual coverage following the celebrated Lindbergh kidnapping case. And even the most ardent supporters of the current experiment, including New York's chief administrative judge, Albert M. Rosenblatt, say those fears linger.

''I don't believe for an instant that the public education is going to be served by having highly sensational 30-second blurbs on the evening news,'' Judge Rosenblatt said. ''All we can do now is observe and hope there will be much broader coverage as well.'' Illustration of Conflict

The conflict over coverage rules was illustrated yesterday when the judge in the Howard Beach trial in State Supreme Court in Queens, Justice Thomas A. Demakos, again ruled that cameras would not be allowed because this would distract the jurors from the testimony. In turn, that decision, which was appealed to the Queens administrative judge, Alfred D. Lerner, was apparently the only thing that insured television coverage of the Staten Island case.

''They told us if he denied the application, they would come here,'' said Richard Nacchio, law secretary to Justice Charles A. Kuffner Jr., who is presiding in a case called People v. Barry Morris. Mr. Morris, a 28-year-old Staten Island man, is charged with the attempted murder of two police officers earlier this year, but the case has not yet been set for trial. The initial application was filed by The Staten Island Advance, which was joined by WCBS-TV, even though a station spokesman acknowledged that the case was not a major news story.

''We think it is imperative that we exercise our rights under the experiment to the fullest extent possible,'' said the spokesman, Marc Morgenstern, an assistant news director.

New York's experiment with cameras in court makes it the 44th state to allow some form of visual coverage in courtrooms, according to the Office of Court Administration. Officials said last October, when the program was announced, that eight other counties, including Nassau and Suffolk, would be phased into such coverage on Feb. 1, 1988, with full statewide participation by next June. The four upstate counties that are to begin today are Monroe, Onondaga, Erie and Chemung.

New York court officials and news organizations said applications had been filed in at least a dozen cases, including the trials of Robert E. Chambers Jr. and Joel B. Steinberg at State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

The Chambers case, in which the defendant is accused of strangling Jennifer Levin in Central Park last year, is in jury selection, with testimony not expected to begin until at least late this month. The judge in that case, Justice Howard E. Bell, has yet to rule on the applications. The case of Mr. Steinberg, charged with murder in the fatal beating last month of a 6-year-old, Lisa Steinberg, is still in the pretrial stages. Both men have pleaded not guilty. ''The attention is clearly going to focus on the sensational cases,'' said Thomas P. Puccio, a prominent trial lawyer who has worked both on camera and off. ''I can't imagine people huddlied around their TV sets to watch the arraignment of a shoplifter.''

He said the main effect of cameras in the courtroom, at least in his experience, was not on the process in the court itself, but outside, where greater media exposure raises the likelihood of jurors or prospective jurors being ''contaminated'' by what they have heard and unable to serve on juries.